Magic is the best card game of all time. Ciro Santilli agrees with this fact, and this has nothing to do with the nostalgia factor of having played it while being a teenager.

It is also the one with the most cumbersome name possible, containing even a bloody colon punctuation in it!

However, besides that, Magic has another major flaw: the cards of old formats (Legacy and Modern), which are the only really interesting ones, are fucking expensive: Section "Magic: The Gathering is too expensive".

Like in mathematics, the most beautiful decks are those that do crazy things:All of this comes to a certain extent from the deep asymmetry that permeates the game.

It is also really interesting to watch as new sets as spoiled and try to guess if certain cards will have any impact on the Modern or Legacy metagame.

Here are some cool decks:

If Ciro were to ever overcome his cheapness and play the legacy forma (which will never happen), he would likely play one of the following decks when trying to be able to win at all:Both of this decks focus on cheating a huge creature into play in one go, and both have combo protection methods (discard for turbo depths, and counterspells for sneak and show). Ciro believes that those decks reflect his personality well, notably Ciro Santilli's self perceived creative personality. Related decks that don't appeal as much to Ciro:And above all, Ciro would never play a fair deck. Grinding victories is not for him. He'd rather quickly decide win/lose status and move on.

Competitive commander is also interesting, although matches tend to be much more random so the format is harder to digest, see for example this channel; Playing With Power MTG channel.

In Ciro's mind, Urza's block is the most epic of all, followed by the masques block. Those sets had a ridiculous power level and epic art, and they happened just before Ciro Santilli started playing during Invasion, which had an extremely low power level in comparison. So Ciro saw some cards from those slightly older formats floating around, but not many, and they felt so mystical and awesome.

ChannelFireball is one of the best Legacy resources out there, but they have too much crap filling in between legacy videos unfortunately.

The following creators share many of Ciro's interests and output large quantities of interesting content covering all memes/overpowered combos of new sets:

Ciro was pleased when he learnt that Steve Wozniak plays magic the gathering.

Magic's competitive play became a mess in the late 2010's. They had a clear tournament structure, but they decided to start changing things every 6 months, and give tournaments meaningless names like "Mythic championship", and it just became impossible to follow what is what.

The mtg.fandom.com/wiki/Card_frame#Original_frame is the best, much more epic all others (notably since 2003 update) ware bullshit, good overview medium.com/@raphaelaleixo/the-graphic-design-for-magic-the-gathering-card-frames-b3b6da4cd003

www.youtube.com/watch?v=5hk3IOQiisg Crazy MTG Scandals That Changed The Game by Nikachu (2021). Good list:

This is a good project. Limited scope to 2D card-like games, but very good within that scope.

Ciro Santilli used it for the 2D version of his Ciro's 2D reinforcement learning games.

Commented and labelled disassembly: gist.github.com/1wErt3r/4048722

Decompilation project: github.com/MitchellSternke/SuperMarioBros-C. That project does not produce the ROM however, it reimplements an emulator + game in a single binary.

Group of students that represent students academic views about the courses.

This would be a dream, but it is also impossible: how can you reconcile automated tasks that are simulated quickly like batch crafting 20 muffings in 30 in-game minutes, with someone who is at the same time fighting a hoard of zombies and taking one action every 2 in-game seconds? Alas.

One of the things Ciro Santilli most deeply despises.

Real luxury is to understand quantum field theory and number theory.

Clothing/jewelry/car luxury is at worst a way to show off. And at best a replacement for nature/the countryside. People living in big cities have lost nature, and to some, looking at luxury goods (or watching television) serves as a (unsatisfactory) replacement.

Gilberto is definitely the most psychedelic/tribal one of the The Holy Trinity of popular Brazilian music, though he also has a boyish quality to his soul.

He is also perhaps the one that impresses Ciro Santilli the most, at times he can't help but feel: